A vocal minority. It’s the phrase that angry men usually use when they are on the wrong side of history. I recently had the pleasure of being lectured about vocal minorities by an angry man. He was the worst kind of angry man, a local councillor, no less.
The lecture series by this angry man was inspired by a debate at my local council on women’s football (soccer). I had been trying to get a decent training field allocated for our local female sport’s team, the North West Sydney Koalas. Their attempts for equality were dismissed as the whinging of a vocal minority.
More on the Koalas later.
In Australia right now, there are 100,000 women playing football. Women now make up one-in-five of the football playing population. Since the Matildas defeated football powerhouse, Brazil, women’s football has finally been given some well-deserved recognition.
We shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that recognition has translated into better career paths for women in football. Not yet, anyway. When it comes to football as a profession, women are starting from a pretty low base. In fact, it’s so low, we find ourselves celebrating a pay dispute that results in Matilda players getting paid the minimum wage.
This isn’t just about the money. Professional sports development relies heavily on access to facilities and training opportunities. Take the North West Sydney Koalas team. The Koalas are the most elite football team based in the Ryde Local Government Area in Sydney’s northern districts. The team plays in NSW Premier League and has produced four Matildas over their short history.
For almost a decade, the team has had no permanent place to train. Instead, like outcasts, girls and their parents have been forced to travel 30 minutes, 2 nights a week, to train at fields outside their local area. The team regularly misses out on hosting home games because the surface of the home field provided by Ryde Council does not meet the minimum requirements for their competition.
As one member of the Koalas board of management put it to me; “if we had produced four Socceroos, Council would be rolling out the red carpet for us.”
In cities such as Sydney, the competition for open and green spaces is getting more intense. According to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald in August, Sydney will lose up to 20 per cent of its open space due to commercial and residential rezoning of park and playing fields. In these circumstances, women’s sports are seriously disadvantaged for field space. Better established male teams with existing access to sporting fields get to maintain their stronghold on field access, while teams like the Koalas perpetually miss out.
According to the United Nations, women’s participation in sport is critical to emotional well-being and improving self-esteem. Importantly, women’s football has responded. A Roy Morgan poll in June this year showed that between 2010 and 2015, women’s football had substantial increases in participation. Interestingly, it was women in the 35-49 age bracket that had the biggest jump, with a 30% increase in the number of players.
In a recent interview for an ABC background briefing program, Australian Matilda Joey Peters reflected on the struggles of representing her nation at the highest level and being able to earn enough money to live. She said:
As a woman, as a female footballer, yeah, you do get conditioned, you get into the culture of realising, well, I can play for my country, but it’s only women’s football, so it’s really not…it’s not as good as men’s.
Herein lies the biggest crux of this problem. There are all the obvious consequences of not appropriately fostering women’s football at the grassroots. It clearly has impacts on the professional development of the game. There are dozens of young girls who will miss out on becoming Matildas because of structural inequity in field allocations and open space.
But just as importantly, we have allowed what, for most people, is a recreational exercise, become a way of culturally conditioning girls to expect less in life. For every young girl who misses out on a decent training or playing field, we have given them a small taste of what they can expect when they move on to study and careers.
If we want real equality in women’s sport, it has to start at the grassroots of the game. If we can’t treat the women’s game seriously when at lower levels, we’re setting women up for disappointment at the upper echelons too. It’s a fight that will need to happen one boring council meeting at a time. But it’s a fight worth having.